A lawsuit filed by a cohort of Texas abortion rights advocates over the state's fetal heartbeat law passed in 2021 could be thrown out after the Texas Supreme Court reversed a lower court's ruling that the lawsuit was valid.
Planned Parenthood centers, attorneys and other abortion rights advocates filed more than a dozen lawsuits — including several against Texas Right to Life and president John Seago — challenging the constitutionality of Texas Senate Bill 8.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 led to Texas law prohibiting abortion in nearly all circumstances except life-threatening situations, a rule that some medical professionals want clarified. But the 2021 "Texas Heartbeat Act" first prohibited abortions in the state once a doctor can detect a fetal heartbeat — generally around six weeks of pregnancy, although some medical professionals have called that terminology misleading. The law can only be enforced through lawsuits by private citizens, not government action.
The plaintiffs argued Texas Right to Life has organized efforts to sue those seen as violating SB 8. A Travis County judge ruled in late 2021 the law was unconstitutional, but he didn't issue an injunction preventing citizens from filing lawsuits under SB 8.
The judge also dismissed Texas Right to Life's effort to throw out the lawsuit under the Texas Citizens Participation Act, a state law that protects people from lawsuits that seek to suppress their First Amendment rights.
A state court of appeals upheld that ruling. But the Texas Supreme Court ruled Friday that the lower courts failed to consider whether the plaintiffs even had standing to file the lawsuit before rejecting Texas Right to Life's motion to dismiss under the TCPA.
After first evaluating whether the abortion rights plaintiffs have standing to challenge SB 8 and Texas Right to Life’s actions, the high court says the Third Court of Appeals has two options — dismiss the lawsuit completely or address how the TCPA could apply to the case.
"If the plaintiffs lack standing, the court should not address the TCPA motion at all," reads the unanimous ruling. "Instead, it should vacate the trial court’s orders and dismiss the case without any remand to the trial court. If the court concludes that the case is justiciable—because the plaintiffs had standing and because there is no other jurisdictional defect—it should do what it prematurely did last time: address the merits of the motion to dismiss, beginning with the applicability of the TCPA to the plaintiffs’ claims."
SB 8 took effect after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to block it in 2021. Judges issued temporary rulings in the aftermath to protect abortions providers from any SB 8 lawsuits from Texas Right to Life.
Seago told KERA News this lawsuit’s validity is the most important issue at hand, and he said Texas Right to Life appreciates that the Texas Supreme Court’s ruling pushes that issue back to the forefront after three years of litigation.
“We're arguing that this should be dismissed because there's really no role for the judge, there's really no role for the court to stop us from doing anything or from trying to regulate our speech,” he said.
But Ella Spottswood, a Planned Parenthood staff attorney representing three Texas Planned Parenthood affiliates and a doctor in the suit, said the high court's ruling is less of a victory for Texas Right to Life and more of a "punt."
"What we would really love to do is to get to the merits of this case and to have a ruling on this incredibly harmful law that Texas has enacted," Spottswood said. "Obviously, we are going to be stuck in debating about the procedure for a little while longer, but we would love to have a ruling from a court that said that this law is as harmful and unconstitutional as we believe it to be."
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